Meetings with Iran are testy, advance

By Steven R. Hurst and Qassim Abdul-Zahra THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Tuesday

May 29, 2007 at 3:09 AM

The United States and Iran broke a 27-year diplomatic freeze yesterday with a four-hour meeting about Iraqi security. The American envoy said there was broad policy agreement but Iran must stop arming and financing militants who are attacking U.S. and Iraqi forces.

Iranian Ambassador Hassan Kazemi Qomi told The Associated Press the two sides would meet again in less than a month. U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker said Washington would decide only after the Iraqi government issued an invitation.

“We don’t have a formal invitation to respond to just yet, so it doesn’t make sense to respond to what we don’t have,” Crocker told reporters after the meeting.

The talks in the Green Zone offices of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki were the first formal and scheduled meeting between Iranian and American government officials since the United States broke diplomatic relations with Tehran after the 1979 Islamic Revolution and the seizure of the U.S. Embassy.

An AP reporter who witnessed the opening of the session said Crocker and Kazemi shook hands.

The American envoy called the meeting “businesslike” and said at “the level of policy and principle, the Iranian position as articulated by the Iranian ambassador was very close to our own.”

However, he said: “What we would obviously like to see, and the Iraqis would clearly like to see, is an action by Iran on the ground to bring what it’s actually doing in line with its stated policy.”

Speaking later at a news conference in the Iranian Embassy, Kazemi said: “We don’t take the American accusations seriously.”

Crocker declined to detail what Kazemi had said in the session, but the Iranian diplomat — formerly a top official in the elite Revolutionary Guards Quds Force — said he had offered to train and equip the Iraqi army and police to create “a new military and security structure” for Iraq.

Kazemi said U.S. efforts to rebuild those forces were inadequate to handle the chaos in Iraq, for which he said Washington bore sole responsibility. He said he also offered to provide what assistance Iran could in rebuilding Iraq’s infrastructure, which he said had been “demolished by the American invaders.”

The icebreaking session, according to both sides, did not veer into other difficult issues that encumber the U.S.-Iranian relationship — primarily Iran’s nuclear program and the more than a quarter-century history of diplomatic estrangement.

For its part, Iran’s Shiite theocracy fears the Bush administration harbors plans for regime change in Tehran and could act on those desires as it did against Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

Washington and its Sunni Arab allies are deeply unnerved by growing Iranian influence in the Middle East and the spread of increasingly radical Islam.

Compounding all that is Iran’s open hostility to Israel.

But the issues at hand in these first formal contacts portend a bruising set of talks — all other issues aside — should the two sides have follow-up meetings.

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